"I Wanted Them To Like Me"

...no subtitle works here

Liat Beinin Atzili, released Israeli hostage

I started to include this story in my last post, which was basically a series of anecdotes about inutile human kindness, what I called a manifestation of “the lovely and loveable world which quietly persists” regardless of the loudest and most terrible human evil/stupidity. I decided that it did not belong in that post because, to repeat myself, it is so much deeper and more dire than the anecdotes I related there, and so far beyond my experience. Indeed, I wasn’t sure I should share it at all; it is not a straight story of uplift. It may be hard for readers to even identify how they actually feel on reading it—it was for me. But I finally decided that it should be known. Because it illustrates that the instinct to be kind can appear in unlikely and even horrific circumstances. It vividly illustrates what I called “the knot of us,” the place of good and evil, mixed.

I read the story this past summer in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Haaretz, which was founded in 1918, is Israel’s oldest existing paper. Editorially it has opposed the Netanyahu government, consistently criticizing and denouncing it’s conduct of the Gaza atrocity. It has just been sanctioned by the Israeli government for being so critical.

There is a great deal to be said about Haaretz. There is a great deal to be said about the ongoing slaughter. But right now I want to focus on this story which is headlined “I Wanted Them To Like Me.” It is the story of a woman named Liat Beinin Atzili, a resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz who was taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7th and released on Nov. 29th during the 4 day ceasefire of 2023 when 50 Israeli hostages were exchanged for 150 Palestinian prisoners. Atzili was alone in a “safe room” with the family dog when she was taken; her husband Aviv had gone out to defend the kibbutz, her two sons (Ofri, 22 and Neta, 20) were staying with friends and her 19-year-old daughter Aya was off the kibbutz entirely. So Atzili was alone when two armed men burst in.

As stated above, I consider Israel’s conduct in Gaza an atrocity. But members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad certainly committed atrocities, rapes and murders. I’ve seen Hamas videos of captured female Israeli soldiers being terrorized and threatened with rape, of a terrified Israeli girl paraded through the streets of Gaza bleeding heavily through her pants. This was the brutal realm which Atzili abruptly entered; it is this context that makes her story a miraculous, slightly surreal respite from that brutality. For her captors behaved gently, even politely. They said “You don’t have to be afraid, we won’t hurt you, come with us.” They gave her time to pack a few things; they helped her look for her glasses. She was still terrified of course, especially when they took her outside and she saw no one, not one of her neighbors. She was taken, alone, not to a tunnel but to the home of one of her abductors. (Several of the captives were kept in private homes.) And then: “His mother welcomed me. I couldn’t stop crying. She had me sit down on the sofa, hugged me and said, ‘It will be alright, it will be alright’…They seemed really worried about me and wanted me to eat and drink. They said ‘We will protect you, you’re safe here, nothing will happen to you.’ They let me shower, change clothes. They washed my clothes.”

Eventually Atzili was moved to another home where she found herself held with another woman from her kibbutz, whose companionship gave her a great deal of comfort; “they shared all their feelings and talked about everything.” They also talked to their guards. This happened at first as a survival ploy, to make the men see them as human, to care about and like them. (From the sound of it, it seems the guards also wanted to be liked by their captives.) The women were fed as well as possible (at that early point there was still enough food in Gaza for that to happen); when Atzili told them that she was a vegetarian they were “shocked” and incredulously asked what she liked to eat. “I told them I really like pizza. So one of them got on his bicycle and brought a pizza from Crispy Pizza in Khan Yunis. After that we asked for fruit and vegetables and they brought them.”

I imagine that there was self-interest on the part of the guards too. From what Atzili reports, they hoped that a prisoner exchange would be happening soon and they probably wanted the world to see that they treated their prisoners decently, that they weren’t animalistic brutes. But the way Atzili tells the story, it went beyond that, on both sides. Here is a piece of what she said in response to the woman interviewing her, who asked “What did they tell you about themselves?”

"One said he's a lawyer, the other a teacher. Both are married and each has a child. The wife of one of them came to the apartment one day with their newborn. We talked about our children, about our spouses, parents, siblings. They talked a lot about their life. One of them had a cat, so we talked about our cats. They told about weddings, about day-to-day life. We talked a lot about food. One of the guards really likes to cook, so they described all kinds of foods: makluba, stuffed vegetables, all kinds of salads."

Atzili asked them why they were affiliated with Hamas. "I was able to understand a little about the place Hamas has in their lives. They talked a lot about the poverty in the Strip, about how hard it is to leave it. Both really wanted to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. They're considered to be middle class – from native Gazan families, not refugee families, and property owners – but said they still could not afford to leave. They asked us curiously whether we had ever eaten at McDonald's. We said yes, what's the big deal, the food is disgusting. They said that in the ads it looked so appealing."

They also openly spoke of politics; Atzili remarked that she was surprised by how much they knew about politics in Israel. One of the most painful moments—painful because it suggests hope in a situation where no hope is possible—was during a one-on-one convo with a guard whom Atzili describes as generally quiet and “shy about speaking English.” (They all conversed in English.) He told Atzili that he’d read about the Holocaust online and asked her to tell him more about it. At the end he confessed that he didn’t know that “so many Jews were murdered;” he said “It’s terrible what happened to you.” That his sincerity becomes situational irony is heartbreaking. So is the way that they parted:

“Before he left us, he said ‘Good luck, may God bless you.’ We thanked him. There were mutual pats on the shoulder. After all, we’d spent a period of time together. One one hand, its a terrible crime, what they did to us, and the fact that they chose to participate in it. On the other hand, they treated us humanely in a way that made it possible for us to get through that period alright…”

Like I said, not a feel-good story. It’s touching but in a way that hurts. It reminds me a little of the famous Christmas Eve truces of WWI, during which men (German) lit candles on their trenches and sang carols which were answered by British troops; eventually they went so far as to drink together, game together and exchange gifts of tobacco, buttons, hats, etc. Then, as one veteran recorded, the peace ended the next afternoon and the killing started again.

Indeed, about 12 hours after Atzili was released she discovered that while her children were all safe her husband Aviv had been killed, if not by her kidnappers, then by their compatriots. At least some of Atzili’s children were likely called to serve in the military; they would have and could have killed the men who guarded their mother; they would have and could have killed their wives and their children, including their newborn. I imagine that Atzili herself would quite naturally shoot her former captors if she were called upon to do so in a combat emergency—and they would understand because they would do the same. To state the obvious, these people are deadly enemies, each side thinking it’s justifiable—or at the least inevitable—to massacre, torture and (in the case of Israel) drone-murder and starve the children of the other. (I am confident that not all Israeli or Palestinian individuals think this way but in the giant wave of collectivity individual variance doesn’t count for much, practically speaking.) The WWI Christmas truce-type situation would not have happened between them, one because the balance of power was so unequal from the start, and two, because that kind of truce would require a modicum of respect and acknowledged commonality that doesn’t appear to exist in Israel or Gaza, at least not among enough people on either side—indeed, at this point, I don’t know how it could.

This incomprehensible brutality makes what happened between Liat Atzili and her kidnappers a remarkable moment of humanity, albeit a very slight and fragile one. The humanity was not only shown by the militants but by Atzili herself who was able to receive their respect and consideration with sincerity. This was surely made possible by the fact that she did not know the full extent of what had happened on Oct. 7 (she did know some of it as her captors allowed her to watch Al-Jazeera on television); from what she says it seems that, however implausibly, the people guarding her actually did not know the full horror of the story themselves.

But by the time Atzili spoke to Haaretz (in July of this year, months after her release) she’d had the time to know and absorb everything. And still she wanted to tell a story that might remind readers of something almost more fundamental than goodness in a moral sense: what I’ve called, in another post, a contact point of shared animal innocence that may exist even between those who will, if called upon, fight to destroy each other utterly. To paraphrase the last few lines of my previous post, this contact point, however tiny, is something that should be honored even if, by itself, it can’t have much pragmatic effect. I know it’s not enough. But, as a human manifestation of something that I believe will continue after we are gone, it matters.

I realize that may sound like desperate fantasy to some readers. If so, just forget what I’ve said and read the interview that Liat Atzili did in Haaretz. I believe you have to subscribe in order to do that—I think it’s worth it, they cover stories that you will not see anywhere else, for example this story by an anonymous Israeli soldier meant to inform the Israeli public about what is actually happening. But if you don’t want a subscription, Atzili also did another interview in the Atlantic which I think is free.